Effective performance management is a crucial aspect of ensuring an organization's success. As we all know, performance management strategies have traditionally relied on manual and tedious processes, making them time-consuming and often subject to human biases.
Yet, the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, or AI, has ushered in a new era in performance management, reshaping how organizations evaluate, motivate, and develop their employees.
This week, our podcast guest, Projjal Ghatak, co-founder and CEO of OnLoop, introduces an innovative approach with his application software, OnLoop, to effectively manage performance using its Collaborative Team Development framework.
Defining Performance Management
Performance management is the process or framework that leaders use to maximize the performance of their workforce. Through this process, leaders set expectations, articulate goals, provide feedback, evaluate results, and develop growth strategies to align with the organization's objectives.
However, as Projjal explained, implementing performance management in the workplace has made people hate goals and feedback. It’s gotten even more challenging after the pandemic when so many teams have adopted a hybrid work model environment, where visibility into employees' activities is limited.
To methodically solve this problem, Projjal came up with the Collaborative Team Development framework.
The Collaborative Team Development Framework
Collaborative Team Development is a five-layer hierarchical framework for managers to use to evaluate individual performance and guide performance-based communications on a day-to-day basis.
Here are the five foundations that make up this framework.
Well-Being
At the base of this pyramid framework lies well-being. Projjal had the insight that a person's well-being or productive capacity is a more significant determinant of performance than anything else. This resonates with my own experience. When a team member is struggling personally, they’re unable to incorporate feedback. Regardless of what you share or how you share it, the feedback is unlikely to yield positive results when a person's well-being is compromised.
Goals
Sitting atop of well-being is goals. Unfortunately, Projjal noted that every goal framework (such as OKRs) that has been built for company performance does not align well with individual performance. And if people don't have clarity on their goals or what they should be individually working towards and how it will be measured, it's hard for them to be effective and be at their best. We need to clarify targets, project objectives, and skills that people are aiming for.
Celebrate and Feedback
Projjal challenges the notion that feedback must always be constructive. He asserts that recognizing and nurturing an individual's strengths–or superpowers, as he calls them–is just as crucial as providing corrective feedback.
Ongoing Professional Growth
Finally, at the pinnacle of this framework is the ongoing professional growth. Based on my conversation with Projjal, learning should align with the skills an individual is trying to develop, guided by the feedback they receive from their managers and colleagues. Performance reviews and feedback should be highly personalized for each person.
Managers are tasked with addressing these five layers for every team member, working through them weekly, ensuring that performance management becomes a streamlined, routine exercise rather than an overwhelming task. And this is where the integration of AI in the performance management process plays a pivotal role.
The Role of AI
One of the remarkable features of OnLoop is its ability to replace the writing of manual performance reviews, which often feel like a chore and is overcome with bias.
The OnLoop platform can compile months' worth of human observations and transform them into a structured narrative detailing a team member's performance over a specific timeframe. This feature allows leaders to conduct consistent, standardized reviews–without biases–across the organization simultaneously.
Furthermore, Projjal and the OnLoop team found out that by making the process of capturing feedback or reviews easy, enjoyable, and aspirational, people are actually happy to do it (think of how SoulCycle has made cycling cool and appealing). When you make something feel fancy and aspirational, people stick to doing it, eventually forming a good habit.
In addition to these features, OnLoop's latest AI capabilities can take raw observations and transform them into more encouraging feedback, reducing friction and increasing the frequency of feedback from managers and their direct reports. Too much feedback doesn’t get shared because the manager is unsure of how to convey it best. With AI, we’re provided language that can help us communicate with Radical Candor.
Leveraging AI in performance management revolutionizes how managers assess and develop their teams. AI not only enhances the objectivity and fairness of these evaluations but also automates time-consuming tasks, freeing managers to focus on the strategic aspects of performance management that ultimately contribute to an organization's long-term success.
For an in-depth discussion about performance management, listen to my entire conversation with Projjal HERE.
Connect with Projjal:
- Follow Projjal on LinkedIn here
- Follow OnLoop on LinkedIn here
- Check out OnLoop on Instagram here
- Visit OnLoop’s official website here
FREE First Quarter of “Collaborative Team Development”
OnLoop is a habit-forming, generative AI-powered goals and feedback platform for high-functioning teams. It uses a proprietary Collaborative Team Development framework to help leaders drive clarity around the 5 hierarchical layers for high performance. Projjal is generously offering the first quarter free for their annual contract of our Collaborative Team Development (CTD) platform if they sign up in 2023 for kickoff in January 2024. For a team of 50, that would mean US$1,500 off!
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